Office 365’s Expanding Enterprise Role

Microsoft last year called the cloud productivity suite its “most strategic development platform.” In 2015, IT will find out exactly what that means with an ambitious rollout of APIs, SDKs, features and initiatives for Office 365.

When Satya Nadella last summer sent an e-mail to employees declaring Microsoft as a “productivity and platforms” provider, it had the aura of a new CEO looking to put his own stamp on the company. Never mind that less than two years earlier Nadella’s predecessor Steve Ballmer reimagined Microsoft as a “devices and services” provider. A week after Nadella’s e-mail, on July 16, he followed the new positioning statement in his first major speech in front of thousands of partners saying Office 365 is the company’s “most strategic developer surface area.” Left unsaid was that Windows, while also still critical and still receiving enormous focus, was no longer the favored child in Redmond. Now Microsoft is running full speed with the new Office 365 mission.

Actually, Microsoft set the stage for Office 365 to become the flagship Microsoft platform back in March at the company’s SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. It was where Microsoft launched the Office Graph, code-named “Oslo,” and promised to unleash a whole new set of APIs and SDKs that would enable the next wave of collaboration. Only in recent months has the significance of these moves started to resonate, even with those in the development community…click here to read the full article